Chapter 9: Digital Transformation in Healthcare: The Past, Promises, Problems, and Potential

The healthcare industry is rapidly changing and faces significant challenges in every nation. More developed countries face exceptional demands for care delivery expansion due to an aging population, whereas less developed countries struggle with delivery improvements relying on stable electric and telecommunications infrastructure. In many cases, what is sustainable and easily adopted in one country may be a non-starter is another—the difficulty of enterprise implementation of digital transformation is highly variable and less portable than most other sectors.

Despite this variability, challenges such as a shared vocabulary, readiness, systems integration, solution sustainability, and privacy will likely be encountered at some point in every country or delivery system’s journey—albeit at different stages and relative severity. Research examining the challenges of nations at various stages of this journey indicates that the process is complex, “fraught with challenges, many possible pathways, and various pitfalls—but is also feasible and achievable” (Reich et al., 2016).